Address to a Mummy

Address to a Mummy.
Horace Smith
224.5

And thou hast walked about how strange a story!
In Thebes’ streets three thousand years ago,
When the Memronium was in all its glory.
And Time had not begun to overthrow
Those temples, palaces, and piles tremendous
Of which the very ruins are stupendous.

Speak! for thou long enough hast acted dummy:
Thou hast a tongue, come. let us hear its tune.
Thou’rt standing on thy legs above ground, Mummy.
Revisiting the glimpses of the moon.
Not like thin ghosts or disembodied creatures.
But with thy bones and flesh and Ilmbs and fea- tures.

Tell us. for doubtless thau canst recollect.
To whom should we assign the Sphinx’s fame?
Was Cheops or Cephrenes architect
Of either pyramid that bears his name?
Is Pompey’s pillar really a misnomer?
Had Thebes a hundred gates, as sung by Homer?

Perchance that very hand, now pinloned flat.
Has hob-a-nobbed with Pharaoh, glass to glass.
Or dropped a half penny in Homer’s hat,
Or doffed thins own to let Queen Dido pass.
Or held. by Solomon’s own invitation
A torch at the great temple’s dedication.

I need not ask thee if that hand, when armed.
Had any Roman soldier maulod and knuckled,
For thou wast dead, burled, and embalmed
Ere Romulus and Ramus had been suckled!
Antiquity appears to have begun
Long after thy primeval race was run.

Thou couldst develop. If that withered tongue
Might tell us what those sightless orbs have seen.
How the world, looked when it was fresh and young
And the great deluge still had left it green.
Or was it then so old that history’s pages
Contained no record of its early ages?

Still allent, incommunicative elf?
Art sworn to secrecy? Then keep thy vows;
But, prithee, tell us something of thyself:
Iteveal the secrets of thy prison house:
Since in the world of spirits thou hast slumbered
What hast thou seen, what strange adventures numbered?

When first thy form was in this box extended
We have, above ground, seen some strange mu- tations:
The Roman empire has begun and ended,
New worlds have risen, we have lost old nations.
And countless kings have into dust been hum- bied.
While not a fragment of thy flesh has crumbled.

Didst thou not hear the pother o’er thy head
When the great Pevelan conqueror. Cambyses.
Marched urinies o’er thy tomb with thundering tread.
O’erthrew Osiris, Orus, Apts. Isis.
And shook the pyramids with fear and wonder,
When the gigantic Memnon fell asunder?

If the tomb’s secrets may not be confessed.
The nature of thy private life unfold;
A heart has throbbed beneath that leathern breast,
And tears adown that dusty cheek have rolled.
Have children climbed those knees and kissed that face?
What was thy name, and station, age and race?

Statue of flesh! Immortal of the dead!
Imperishable type of evanescence!
Posthumous man. who quitt’st thy narrow
And stundest undecared within our presanco, bed
Thou wilt hear nothing till the judgment morning.
When the great trump shall thrill thee with its warning!